** The Aborted Generation **

by Ronald L. Dart,

Pastor, Church of God, International

The high school graduating class of '94 was decimated by a terrible plague and no one paid it much mind. If a bus load of them had been killed on the way to a game, it would have made headlines -- at least locally. If a school had blown up and killed a few hundred of them, it would have made national, even worldwide, news.

Yet, eighteen years ago, over one million of those who would have formed the class of '94 went up in smoke in hospital and clinic incinerators or were otherwise disposed of as medical waste. There was no burial with weeping mothers and fathers, no flowers, no honored place in the family burial plot. There was no stone placed on a grave, but then there was no grave nor any name to write.

They were not even mourned, except for the mothers-to-be, who were surprised by their own grief once the deed was done. The community, instead of mourning for the loss, began to scramble for the right to use the tiny remains in some practical way. They could be cut up and used for spare parts and medical research. Some enterprising soul wanted to grind up the remains and use them to make cosmetics. We Americans are nothing if we are not a practical people -- waste not, want not.

These were children who, had they been allowed to live, should have formed a part of the class of '94. But they are only a small part of an aborted generation. Since the Supreme Court took away from the states the right to prohibit abortions, 30 million potential United States citizens have been destroyed. Can you imagine the equivalent of the combined population of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida wiped out? Hiroshima and Nagasaki were minor league.

The abortion industry has cut the heart right out of a generation of Americans. Among that 30 million babies, children, teens, and young adults to be (the oldest of the aborted generation would now be about 22), they killed off thousands of scientists, teachers, doctors, researchers, perhaps even the woman who would have found a cure for breast cancer. We will never know what we have lost.

It is astonishing that our people can be so cold blooded about all this. Each child is a personal tragedy -- each potential mother, a torn, violated vessel. But the whole mass of the thing numbs the mind. Can anyone seriously believe that we can engage in such massive destruction of life and not pay for it?

A country's strength is in its people. A growing population means a large work force, more productivity, and more wealth for the nation as a whole. And Congress must face up to the fact that we will be 30 million taxpayers short in years to come. The impact of all those abortions will fall most severely on the generation that aborted them.

In the same time frame, there have been some 19 million illegitimate babies born. We have 30 million dead and another 19 million socially crippled -- the first of them just beginning to come of age. If the abortion advocates had their way, most of that 19 million would have been aborted. To the number already gone, you could add the populations of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, and West Virginia. In the past twenty-two years, we have killed or damaged the population equivalent of the entire southeastern quadrant of the United States -- a small nation of nearly 50 million people.

Abortion seems to have leveled off at around 1.7 million newborns-to-be every year, but the illegitimacy problem grows worse by the hour. According to Patrick Fagan of the Heritage Foundation, by the year 2010 more than half of all babies born in the USA will be born illegitimate and will be raised in fatherless households. Already, 68 percent of black children and 22 percent of white children are born illegitimate. The overall figure is nearly 30 percent, and rising fast.

Some thirty years ago a much younger Patrick Moynihan (now United States Senator from New York) was worrying about the inevitable destruction of the black family in America. His concern? The illegitimacy rate among blacks was a frightening 25 percent. He felt the family could not long survive this kind of assault. How have things changed? Now the white illegitimacy rate is approaching 25 percent while the black rate has nearly tripled. When he was given the latest figures in a recent Senate hearing, Moynihan was nearly struck dumb. Nothing like this, he said, has ever existed in a civilized country.

One surprising thing arises from an analysis of all the statistics -- the problem of illegitimacy is much worse in poverty stricken areas (Appalachia, the Ozarks, the rural South, and the inner cities). This does not necessarily suggest that the poor areas are less moral, but that the more affluent areas are solving the problem with abortion.

Here may lie the reason for the drive to federally fund abortions. The poorest and weakest of our society are having more babies than the intelligent and able. Black leaders do not seem to have tumbled to the fact that the design of federally funded abortions may be to help bring the black population under control. It will certainly kill more black babies than white.

Patrick Fagan of the Heritage Foundation put it in perspective: "It is not necessary to see family breakdown as a moral issue, although many certainly do, in order to understand the rapidly destructive impact of illegitimacy on society. Any specialist who gains perspective on the issue sooner or later is forced to admit that ultimately the survival of our civilization is at stake."

Consider the impact of illegitimacy as described by Fagan for the Heritage Foundation:

Fagan's final analysis is riveting. "The U.S. government must take a positive interest in stable, two-parent families. For too long it has rewarded mothers who have children out of wedlock with steadily increasing welfare benefits and placed an intolerable tax burden on parents who stay together. If this doesn't stop-and soon-America will self destruct."

But what is worrisome is that every effort of our government only seems to make things worse. There has never been a time in the history of the United States when more was being done to teach young people about sex. Yet the more we teach, the worse the problem becomes. Social workers hand out condoms in schools to prevent disease and still the birth rate goes up. Parents take high school girls to abortion clinics to put a check on illegitimate births and yet teen sexual activity increases. When is the government going to wake up and realize they are leading the country down the wrong path?

I was surprised to see Donna Shalala, a member of the president's cabinet, acknowledge before a congressional hearing that we cannot afford to do anything to encourage the birth of more children out of wedlock. The conservative press crowed the next day that Shalala had admitted that former vice-president Dan Quayle was right. Within hours she was busy explaining her statement.

When the fruits of this failed social experiment become evident to everybody -- and more and more are beginning to see it -- you will be hard pressed to find anyone who has not always been pro-family. "Who, me?" they will protest, "I have never been in favor of these policies." They will all be like the prophets whom Zechariah described:

"And it shall come to pass in that day, that the prophets shall be ashamed every one of his vision, when he hath prophesied; neither shall they wear a rough garment to deceive: But he shall say, I am no prophet, I am an husbandman; for man taught me to keep cattle from my youth" (Zechariah 13: 1 -5).

Where did we go wrong? Most people point the finger at the '60s, and indeed many of the roads we have followed seem to intersect there. But what explains the '60s? How did we get there? And what happened to lead us to abort a generation of children and create another generation of fatherless children?

There is a fundamental conflict between man and God. The great apostle Paul declared human nature as fundamentally corrupt and at odds with God: "To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God's law, indeed it cannot" (Romans 8:6,7 RSV).

Of all the restrictions God places on men, the most odious (to man) are those that have to do with sex. God does not condone adultery, fornication, incest, bestiality, or homosexuality. Man has never cheerfully accepted this, but religion and the state have kept a lid on the seething pot through most of history. Divorce was illegal along with sodomy and incest. Abortion was dangerous, conception always possible, and syphilis dogged the steps of many a philanderer.

The ruling class, of course, were always above the law. They moved from bed to bed with merry abandon and even had secret doors and passageways in their homes and castles to facilitate liaisons. It comes as a surprise to learn that Victorian prudery never touched the aristocratic set (although syphilis sometimes did).

It was Charles Darwin that gave the intelligentsia the key to their own chastity belt. That was not Darwin's intent, but Aldous Huxley and others grasped eagerly at the idea of evolution. If man had evolved, they thought, then there was no God. If there was no God, then all His restrictions could be ignored.

Huxley had second thoughts later in life, and explained himself this way:

"I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption...For myself as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from...a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust...There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people [economists, politicians, and theologians] and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic revolt: we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever."
Similar tactics had been adopted during the eighteenth century and for the same reasons...The chief reason for being 'philosophical' was that one might be free from prejudices-above all prejudices of a sexual nature....

"It was the manifestly poisonous nature of the fruits [the effects of such moral and sexual unrestraint] that forced me to reconsider the philosophical tree on which they had grown." (Ends and Means, 1937; pp. 312,315,316.)

It took a while for these ideas to make their way through the intelligentsia to the universities. Late in the last century, the German theological schools, perhaps infected with the same virus, began to chop away at the authority of the Bible. Two world wars inhibited the spread of these ideas from Europe to the New World, but spread they did --through the theological schools and universities and finally to the pulpits and classrooms. In the United States, the disease finally broke out onto the skin in the infamous 1960s.

Charles Colson's summary of the '60s deserves attention:

"When the hippies in the 1960's insisted on the freedom to do their own thing, it was part of what I believe was the most profound cultural revolution in American history. When the flower children indulged in cheap drugs and free sex, many of us thought they were simply reveling in old-fashioned immorality. But there was something new here. The hippies were not just violating accepted standards of behavior -- they were saying there are no accepted standards of behavior."

The '60s didn't cause anything. The '60s were a rank demonstration of how far the nation had come in its thinking. With Woodstock, our youth went from groping one another at the drive-in to rutting in the mud. The normal consequences of all this -- more babies -- had to be dealt with, hence the legalization of abortion early in the '70s.

The fruits of the sexual revolution were coming home to roost. Too many fatherless children were coming into the world. Traditional contraception did not convey the "reproductive freedom" desired, so abortion was necessary. You would be hard pressed to find anyone to acknowledge it, but the vehemence of the pro-abortion advocates today does not grow out of a constitutional question of rights, but out of a desire to sleep with anyone they choose without paying for it.

But pay, they will. Or rather, we will all pay.

But doesn't a woman have a right to do as she wills with her own body? Doesn't she have a right to privacy? Well, no.

Think of it this way. Why do we require parents to take care of children?

Why doesn't a mother have the right to dispose of her troublesome newborn in a trash can? How can we as a society require her to nurse this baby -- doesn't she have the right to her own body? If the baby is crying in the night, why can't she put it out on the front porch until morning? After all, she needs her sleep, doesn't she?

If a newborn child is crippled, has Down syndrome, or is the wrong sex, couldn't we just kill it? Some civilizations have done just that. Who are we to demand that a poor mother take care of her crippled child?

But we do demand it, and rightly so. A woman's right to privacy and her right to her own body will not protect her against charges of child neglect or abuse. The right to privacy argument does not work here. Can a woman really do what she wants with her own body? Can she sell herself for prostitution? Can she take illegal drugs in privacy? Do parents have the right to abuse or neglect their children in the privacy of their own home? As a society, we have long realized that any perceived right to privacy must be superseded by responsibility.

To allow parents to dispose of unwanted or troublesome children would seem monstrous to us. Why then does it seem so monstrous to forbid abortion? Once a choice is made to conceive (and it is a choice), society has a right to hold those who make that choice responsible for the new life they have brought into the world.

Much is made of women wanting their "reproductive freedom." Well, doesn't reproductive freedom start before coitus? It is not "reproductive freedom" that is at stake, it is sexual freedom-the freedom to copulate with anyone, anywhere, anytime with no consequences. Some fools do not yet realize that there are some freedoms beyond the reach of the constitution -- unless you consider among the freedoms granted, the freedom to get AIDS, gonorrhea, and syphilis.

Trying to grapple with the issue of abortion and immorality is like looking at the world through a shattered windshield. So many lies have been told, so many truths "reinterpreted," that a kind of craziness has set in.

How, for example, can a man who is "pro-life" step out of the shadows and blast the life out of a surgeon who is performing abortions? He took a life -- but he changed nothing. There may be a perverse logic that runs along the lines of the "just war" hypothesis. Sergeant York, a pacifist by faith, justified the killing of Germans to stop the killing. But this man stopped no killing. Another surgeon was in place within days taking care of the case load.

It is not hard to understand the religious fervor of the anti-abortion movement. After all, they are mainly Christians. They believe in God. They believe that children are a gift of God, and that they have a religious duty to oppose abortion by all legal means. Some even believe they must oppose abortion by any means, legal or illegal. There is a religious passion and a willingness to sacrifice for the cause. Cardinal O'Connor has vowed that he will go to jail before he will allow Catholic hospitals to perform abortions. He added that not one of his bishops would stand by and let it happen.

The anti-abortion movement is passionate and evangelistic. They are working vigorously to reverse the trend toward abortions. The news media like pictures, so what you mainly see are picket lines around abortion clinics and bullet holes in a pickup truck where a surgeon was shot. But pro-life advocates are mostly engaged in persuasion and alternatives. They evangelize -- that is they try to make converts to their beliefs, both among decision makers and mothers to be. They also offer alternative services for mothers-to-be. None of this is surprising. After all, this is a religious crusade.

What is harder to fathom is the source of the passion on the "pro-choice" side of the issue. Why are these people such evangelists? What is their faith? For some, money is the big issue, but for others, there is a different kind of evangelism. There is an almost religious dedication on the part of the "pro-choice" advocates that is hard to fathom.

Consider the homeroom teacher who learned that one of "her girls" was pregnant. We don't know what conversations the teacher had with the girl. What we do know is that the parents were not yet aware of their daughter's pregnancy. We know that the teacher took the girl, without her parents' knowledge or permission, to an abortion clinic and that an abortion was performed. A few days later, the girl began to hemorrhage and had to be rushed to the hospital. Only then did her parents learn of the abortion. They are presently suing the teacher, the school system, and everyone else involved.

What rationale led the teacher to take such a risk? What evangelistic fervor caused her to keep the parents in the dark and take such a risk upon herself? What system of thought led her to persuade the girl to have an abortion rather than to carry the baby to term and put it up for adoption?

And what about the parents? Their first grandchild was destroyed without a second thought for their wishes. Have we the people granted schools that kind of power? If your daughter has a headache at school, the school nurse cannot give her an aspirin without your permission. But there are those who want to give her birth control pills without your knowledge. If your son wants to play football, he must have your permission. But if your daughter wants an abortion, you don't have to know.

If a male teacher violated the body of a teenage girl, our community would rise up in arms and send him to jail. But a female teacher can take a girl to an abortion clinic where her body is violated to destroy the life within her, and our community is willing to pick up the tab and keep the parents in the dark. How crazy does it have to get?

Many of the abortion clinics around the country are operated by an organization called Planned Parenthood -- an organization devoted to (perhaps obsessed with) population control. Planned Parenthood is also involved in the expansion of "school-based clinics" into schools around the country. Their aim is to get the foot in the door by offering health services, and then move on quietly into contraception and abortion counseling.

This seems to be a necessary follow on to the sex education programs in the schools -- programs that in many cases have had the net effect of increasing sexual activity among students. The problem is that the schools are trying to teach sex education from a "morally neutral" position. In other words, your schools in your community are teaching your children about sex from an amoral point of view. The result has been an explosion of sexual activity with all the baggage that goes with it -- illegitimate children, sexually transmitted diseases, AIDS, and poverty.

The free condom programs in schools are an attempt to head off the consequences. The result is still more sexual activity. The next step is abortion services. Even the government is conniving with the schools to stem the tide of illegitimate births. In the zeal to keep the right to have an abortion, the state seems almost to declare abortion a positive good. How else can we allow our children to copulate like cats and dogs and keep the population under control ?

But in the process, we dramatically challenged the value of life. Mother Teresa said:

"If we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill each other?...Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want."

Consider the facts. Since 1960, teenage suicide has tripled in the United States. The rate of suicide seems to have made the most radical change at the start of the 1970s. Violence in schools has increased even more dramatically.

One of the most disturbing of the violent trends in America is child abuse. Since abortion was legalized, child abuse has risen over 500 percent. The sexual abuse of children has reached epidemic proportions. There is even a small movement underway to legalize sex with children. So far they have made no progress.

Do we understand what society really wants? They want the right to have sex whenever, with whomever, and however they want, and they want to do it with no penalty. This is a right that is beyond the power of any government to confer. How could we be such fools? It is one thing to engage in great social experiments, but did we have to experiment with our children?

We are now moving into the resulting stage of a social experiment so monstrous that it boggles the mind. The results may be irreversible. If not one more illegitimate child were born, if no more abortions were permitted, we would be generations recovering from what we have already done. But there is no sign that any change is in the offing. The American and Canadian governments are determined -- the craziness will go on.

When I speak of our governments, I am not referring to any individual, institution, or political party. I am referring to a system that has a mind of its own and that is subject to no one. It is like a giant computer run amuck which no one can turn off. Its prime directive is to increase in power and control, and to destroy any opposition to its will.

President Clinton thought he had found something that government could not do. When a group of young Christians came to Washington to take a pledge for virginity, they were received by the president who told them that this was an area where the government was powerless -- the maintenance of virginity was a matter for private initiative.

What an astonishing statement! The government has systematically prohibited all moral teachings from the schools. Students can no longer pray in school. Teachers can no longer say that extra-marital sex is immoral. How can he possibly say that there is nothing the government can do? It has already done too much.

Let me advance one novel idea of what the government can do to help. It can stop interfering with the teaching of moral behavior in schools. The federal government can get out of education altogether and leave the teaching of our children to our communities.

When it comes to government, you should keep in mind the fact that politicians receive large campaign donations from pro-abortion organizations. Abortion is a lucrative business. If you question this, ask yourself how you would go about getting an abortion if you wanted one. Where would you look for information on abortion services ? A county health officer? No, you should look where you always look for services, the yellow pages of your phone book! In our town, abortion is the first listing.

There is a curious thing I noted about our town -- Tyler, Texas. We have only one abortion provider in town, but nine listings in the book. Eight of them have 800 numbers and are located in Dallas, Houston, Shreveport, and Lufkin (a Texas town about eighty miles away). They advertise like car dealers and lawyers. They advertise services like counseling, birth control information, ob/gyn physicians, convenient locations, regular abortion services, advanced abortion services, individual and confidential care, licensed by the state, and "established since 1973." That one got into business as soon as it could after Roe v. Wade became the law of the land.

They also offer free pregnancy testing. When people start handing out free samples, it is usually to sell you something. Free pregnancy testing gets you in the door. Then they offer "counseling." When a car salesman gets you to come down to his showroom and then offers you "counseling" on a car purchase, what is going on? A sales pitch, of course. The people who make money from the business of abortion are the same people offering the counseling. Surely they would not try to sell an abortion, would they?

Surely, they would. By all accounts, when teenagers get what is called "abortion counseling" it is usually a sales pitch to get rid of the baby so they can get on with their lives.

How has the government, which is supposed to protect its weaker citizens, come to such a place? In rendering Roe v. Wade, the United States Supreme Court decided that an unborn baby is not a "person" before the law. In making this decision, the court followed a long tradition. In the 1857 Dred Scott decision, the court decided that a black slave, even though freed, could not be considered a United States citizen. Thus, if he returned to a slave state, he was subject to the laws of that state -- presumably, he could be apprehended and sold.

This same tradition was alive in the German courts in the 1930s when they decided that Jews and others were "subhuman" and did not have rights before German law. The feeble minded were sterilized, and everyone knows what happened to the Jews.

In all fairness, the German Supreme Court has since firmly repudiated that view. When Germany's liberal abortion law was challenged in the courts, the Supreme Court struck it down. The court declared that the constitution "obliges the state to protect human life" and that "the unborn are part of human life." They argued that the "bitter experience" of the Nazi period gives historical evidence of what can happen when the right to life is not give absolute priority.

History is turned on its head when our own courts will not recognize what the German courts plainly see. The holocaust, they recognized, did not start with gas chambers. It started when ordinary people accepted the principle that it is permissible to take an innocent human life.

A government has the power to simply define away a person's rights by deciding that they are no longer a person. Not being a person, they have no standing before the law. How long will it be before we decide that an old woman, who is unconscious in the hospital, is no longer a person? When will we decide that a person who is mentally retarded and incapable of functioning in society is no longer a person?

Who is the final authority on morality? Well, God is, of course. If then the final authority on morality is God, and if the state becomes the final authority on morality, then the state is god. If you have wondered at the growing hostility of our own government toward the "religious right," look no further. The God of the Christians is competition for the state-god.

We are headed for great conflict between church and state. When the founding fathers of our country penned the Constitution, they had no intent of making the church subordinate to the state. But the state-god will brook no competition. The first commandment of the state-god should be familiar: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." In the end, the state will insist on subordination or elimination of all opposition.

The state is powerless before many things, but doesn't know it. As the state grasps at more and more power to solve its problems, it will finally enslave its people. Men of earlier generations knew this -- had experienced it. We seem to have forgotten.

God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son to die for His people. Expect no such sacrifice from he state-god. The government is that god, and its prime directive is to increase in power, and to defend itself against all assaults. The state, in spite of its protestations of caring, cannot love its people. The state has no heart, no soul. When someone in government speaks of compassion, keep one thing in mind. The government has only two tools to work with -- law and force.

The state cannot or will not teach that some acts are intrinsically right and some are clearly wrong. Rather, acts are right or wrong as prescribed by government. And the public seems willing enough to follow the lead. The government says that abortion is not against the law, so it can't be wrong.

The citizens of our beloved country are bowing down before an idol, and they don't even know it.

Don't misunderstand. Neither the president, congress, nor the courts are that idol. The government, the state-god, is our own creation. When Pilate brought Jesus before the multitude, he shouted, "Behold your king." The people cried out, "We have no king but Caesar." Yes, and no god but the state.

Government will inevitably take on a mind of its own, but woe to the people when that mind is unsound. A measure of any social policy is the degree of craziness associated with it. It is also a measure of the sanity of the system that generates it.

The worry about population control created Planned Parenthood and authored any number of government programs. The problem with government programs, as everyone knows, is that they take on a life of their own -- often outlasting any need for the program They create power centers, and it is not in the nature of any system to voluntarily give up power.

Population control became a mantra for servants of the state-god. And yet, overpopulation is not the problem it once was nor is famine. The world can produce enough food for everyone -- the problem is one of distribution. And war. Every famine of recent times has been generated by war.

Famine was a major concern in the 1960s. An important book came out early in that decade entitled "Famine 1975 -- America's Decision, Who Will Survive?" The author was predicting terrible famine and mass starvation by the mid '70s, and the United States, unable to feed the world, would have to decide who would survive and who would die. The major assumption in the book, one that went largely unquestioned, was "if present trends continue."

Well, the "present trends" did not continue. Major strides in food production-even in third world countries changed the picture dramatically. And (to everyone's surprise) as available food increased, population growth slowed.

But what about Somalia? Isn't this a modern famine? Yes, it is very much a modern famine. The difference between a modem famine and many of those in the past, is war. Every famine of recent years has been brought on by war. Sometimes the famine is a result of deliberate genocide as one tribe or another is cut off from available food supplies.

One wonders why the governments of the world stand idly by watching while Africans kill one another. Perhaps it is just another form of population control. Think of how much better off all these people would be if they had just been aborted. Then there are those pesky Bosnians. But the Muslims of Bosnia, you see, serve another god. If there must be population control, better the servants of another god than ours.

Perhaps abortion will serve better than all these wars. In September the United Nations Conference on Population and Development began in Cairo. The Clinton Administration, serving the goals of the state, insisted that the U.N. plan should include a right to abortion.

This in direct opposition to the policy advanced at the Mexico City population conference when the U. S. representatives argued that population growth was not a major problem for the world and favored barring any funding for U.N. or private-sector family planning agencies that provided abortion information or services.

The meeting in Cairo in September dealt once again with the idea that there are too many people on the earth and that "people spoil the environment." The earth goddess is a worthy consort to the state-god, and must be served whatever the cost to human life. The United States representatives went to that conference as missionaries for the abortion movement.

Truth can come from surprising quarters from time to time. Not long ago, Mother Teresa warned in a speech:

"America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v. Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate of human relationships. It has aggravated the derogation of the father's role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest gift -- a child -- as a competitor, an intrusion, and an inconvenience. It has nominally accorded mothers unfettered dominion over the independent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters. And, in granting this unconscionable power, it has exposed many women to unjust and selfish demands from their husbands or other sexual partners."

It is hard to understand at this point how "deformed" this nation has become, and even harder to imagine where it will all lead. Think of all the things the coming generation will be able to do -- things that were denied to us. The coming generation, unhampered by any moral code except that of the state may be able to dispose of all the feeble, the old, the sick, the infirm, the mentally ill. Abortion will get rid of all the unwanted children, especially the crippled, the retarded, the blind. They will even be able to get rid of hyperactive children before they are born.

Think of all the savings in health care. Cost control will finally be in the grasp of government. Universal health care will be simple, because the "universe" to be covered will have been shrunk to manageable size. Perhaps the first generation to be disposed of in old age will be the generation that aborted their own children.

If this article sounds like a Jeremiad, so be it. Jeremiah and all the prophets warned God's people that idolatry would destroy them. Then, as now, the most helpless victims of idolatry were the children:

"And they served their idols: which were a snare unto them. Yea, they sacrificed their sons and their daughters unto devils, and shed innocent blood, even the blood of their sons and of their daughters, whom they sacrificed unto the idols of Canaan: and the land was polluted with blood" (Psalms 106:36-38).

That land may have been more polluted with the blood of its children than our land. But we are not finished yet. We have hardened our hearts and have changed the very character of the nation. If history is any guide, a people who have gone as far as we have do not turn back without a national awakening. And that national awakening will not happen without a national trauma.

God will chastise. He will not allow us to descend to the level of Sodom and Gomorrah. But it is going to be a near thing.

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Ronald L. Dart is a minister with the Church of God, International. This church is better known for its leader, Garner Ted Armstrong. This sermon appeared in the October 1994 issue of the church's magazine, "Twentieth Century Watch."

To get a copy of this magazine, write to:

Twentieth Century Watch,
c/o The Church of God, International P.O. Box 2530
Tyler, Texas 75710

"The Aborted Generation" copyright 1994, Twentieth Century Watch.

This document placed into e-text by Martin Lindstedt, Patrick Henry's Debate Hall BBS, Rt. 2 Box 2008, Granby Missouri with the permission of the author and 20th Century Watch Magazine.


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